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ants_everywhere 10 hours ago

Big Brother is a reference to George Orwell's critique of Communism in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Qwen is a video model trained by a Communist government, or technically by a company with very close ties to the Chinese government. The Chinese government also has laws requiring AI be used to further the political goals of China in particular and authoritarian socialism in general.

In the light of all this, I think it's reasonable to conclude that this technology will be used for Big Brother type surveillance and quite possible that it was created explicitly for that purpose.

Intermernet 8 hours ago | parent [-]

Just nitpicking here, but 1984 is a critique of totalitarianism. The only references to systems of government in the book refer to "The German Nazis and the Russian Communists".

Orwell was a democratic socialist. He was opposed to totalitarian politics, not communism per se.

ants_everywhere 8 hours ago | parent [-]

It's true that it's about totalitarianism to some extent. But we have Orwell's actual words here that it's chiefly about communism

> [Nineteen Eighty-Four] was based chiefly on communism, because that is the dominant form of totalitarianism, but I was trying chiefly to imagine what communism would be like if it were firmly rooted in the English speaking countries, and was no longer a mere extension of the Russian Foreign Office.

And of course Animal Farm is only about communism (as opposed to communism + fascism). And the lesser known Homage to Catalonia depicts the communist suppression of other socialist groups.

By all this I just mean to say when you're reading Nineteen Eighty-Four what he's describing is barely a fictionalization of what was already going on in the Soviet Union. There's just not a lot in the book that is specifically Nazi or Fascist.

I don't have any opinion on whether he thought there were non-totalitarian forms of communism.